Page 39 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

“And he was looking at you?”

“Yes.”

She drinks half her coffee in one swallow. “What happens now?”

I look across the diner at Ryker. He’s already on the phone with Mason, voice low, relaying the details. Ridge Auto associate. Possible identification of the witness. Vehicle heading south. Brock in pursuit.

“Now,” I say, “we find out who he calls.”

Greta looks at me. Something passes between us that isn’t the old familiar respect of a boss for her waitress. Something newer. Harder. The respect of a woman looking at another woman who’s walked through something terrible and come out the other side with a different voice.

The bell jingles. Another customer. Greta stands, smooths her apron, and walks to the register.

“Morning, hon. What can I get you?” Her hands have stopped shaking. Her voice is the same voice it’s been for years.

The diner goes on. Somewhere on the highway heading south, a man in a dark pickup is reaching for his phone, and Brock is three cars back. The distance between Tyler and the end of his freedom has just gotten shorter.

20

Ryker

We’re back at the cabin.

Mason pulled us out of Timber Creek after the diner. Too exposed. Tyler’s people are running reconnaissance on Zoe’s known locations and the diner is the most known one she has. The motel in Bridger was only a holding position. The cabin, thirty miles up a Forest Service road and accessible only to people who know it’s there, is the safest place while the net closes around Tyler and the Ridge Auto man whose phone Brock is tracking through the Alpha Range corridor.

So we’re back. Fire burning. Generator humming. Quilts on the bed. The chair is still beside it, but neither of us is using it anymore.

She’s lying against me. She’s not sleeping. I can tell by her breathing. She’s thinking, and the weight of it pulls at the space between us even though we’re touching. Her back is against my chest, my arm over her waist.

“Tell me the thing you haven’t told me,” she says.

I know what she’s asking. She’s been circling it since the scar she saw on my side, since the night she asked how I knew about the nightmare and I said “experience.”

“Which thing?”

“The one that left the scar.”

The cabin’s dark except for the embers. Outside the wind has settled into its steady winter rhythm. It’s a good night for telling.

“Helmand Province,” I say. “February. Routine clearance patrol. Four of us moving through a village that had been flagged for insurgent activity but showed nothing when we got there. Empty streets. Dogs sleeping in doorways. The kind of quiet that could mean peaceful or could mean the village cleared out because they knew what was coming.”

Her hand finds mine on her waist and her fingers lace through mine.

“We were halfway through when the IED took the lead vehicle. Not ours. The one ahead of us, six Marines from a different unit. The blast sheared the front axle off the Humvee and flipped it into a ditch. The air turned solid for a second and hit you in the chest like a wall.”

I pause. The memory still has edges.

“After the blast, small arms fire from three positions. Coordinated. We were in the kill zone. Mason was already out, returning fire from behind the engine block. The two of us worked forward toward the flipped Humvee because there were men inside and some of them were screaming and some of them weren’t.”

“The first Marine I pulled was already dead. I knew it when I grabbed his vest and his head moved wrong. The second was alive but barely, legs trapped under the dashboard. I got him free and dragged him to cover. Went back for the third.”

“His name was Corporal David Herrera. Twenty-two. From El Paso. He had a photograph of his daughter taped inside his helmet. I know because when I reached him the helmet had come off and the photo was lying in the dirt beside his head. Little girl, maybe three, dark hair in pigtails, gap-toothed smile. He was pinned under a section of the frame that had collapsed when it rolled. He looked at me with the expression men have when they know the next few minutes will decide whether they see their kid again.”

Zoe’s hand tightens on mine. She doesn’t speak.

“I couldn’t free him. The frame was too heavy. I could’ve gone for the jack from our vehicle, but that would’ve taken forty seconds and I didn’t think he had forty seconds. So I braced my back against the frame and lifted. With my legs and my spine. I felt something in my left side tear, and the warmth that followed was blood, and I kept lifting because that little girl with the pigtails deserved to see her father walk through the door.”

“The frame came up about four inches. Enough for Mason to pull him free. I held it another three seconds while Mason dragged him clear, then I dropped it and the real pain hit and I went down.”